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Pasasalamat is what Social Weather Stations, a consciously nonsectarian institution, calls its annual holiday season party. We started using the name 20-plus years ago, upon discovering that a staff member’s religion forbade attending any party and receiving…
The measurement of happiness is a regular activity in quality-of-life research. There is a World Database of Happiness (WDH) and a Journal of Happiness Studies (JHS); Professor Ruut Veenhoven of Erasmus University, Netherlands, WDH founder and JHS’…
Have you noticed that many indicators of human well-being are formulated negatively, in terms of the reduction of ill-being, rather than positively, in terms of the addition to well-being? Consider, in particular, the United Nations’ top two…
Upon invitation of the National Economic and Development Authority, I was a panelist at its recent monitoring and evaluation network forum (11/28/22). There I showed the time-charts of four of the Social Weather Stations quarterly indicators of…
Last week, I argued for a very simple, reliable, and practical indicator of Progress, with a capital P: Progress is a situation when more people say that their Quality of Life got better, than say it got…
There’s a lot of crowing, especially from the banking profession, about the latest report that the quarterly gross national product (GNP) grew by over 7 percent from last year. The new figures are nice to see, but…
What strikes me most about the new Social Weather Stations hunger survey is that the richest area of the country, the National Capital Region (NCR), is again the one with the highest proportion of hungry households. All…
The title of this piece is the epitaph of my father, Federico Mangahas (1904-1979). While he made his living with his words, he made his life with his plants, at our home on the UP Diliman campus.…
To mark the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (Oct. 17), the World Bank (WB) issued a Poverty and Equity Brief for the Philippines this week (https://bit.ly/PhJobsineq). It cited the government’s latest poverty number, which refers…
Recently, on my first visit to a cardiologist, his secretary immediately took my height, weight, blood pressure, and temperature, and then showed me where to sit and wait for him to be free; that’s the routine. Being…
What’s the difference? Both the gross national product (GNP) and the gross domestic product (GDP) are sum totals of the money-value of goods and services produced over some period of time. The former refers to what is…
The dollar-peso rate is merely how some green paper that Americans accept for their products is bartered for some multicolored paper that we Filipinos accept for our products. Regardless of its fascination for journalists, it doesn’t affect…
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